Equinox (1970)

David Fielding (Edward Connell), an inmate in a mental institution, becomes agitated and sure that he will die, as it has been a year and a day since his friends disappeared with him while on a picnic to find their lost professor.

It turns out Dr. Arthur Waterman (Fritz Lieber, Jr.) was fiddling around with some magical forces, and as David, his girlfriend Susan (Barbara Hewitt), friend Jim (Frank Bonner) and his girlfriend Vicki (Robin Christopher) arrive they find the professor's house smashed to bits.  They are directed by a tape recording to head out to a state park, where they run into a forest ranger (Jack Woods) with the unlikely name of Asmodeus.  Hearing a voice from a cave, and thinking it may be Waterman, they investigate, finding an old man guarding an ancient book, which he hands over to them, glad to be rid of it.

It turns out that Waterman at some point was also in possession of the book and, using notes he made, the friends translate it.  Waterman's meddling, it seems, has opened a crack into another dimension, allowing Asmodeus to come through.  Meanwhile, Asmodeus tries different methods of retrieving the book for himself, from possessing the friends to summoning creatures to attack them. 

The movie was directed by Dennis Muren, who would later provide special effects work for Industrial Light and Magic, and Woods, who mainly filmed the hospital scenes in order to stretch what was essentially a student film project into a feature.  While the acting and pacing are amateurish, the surprise in the movie is the special effects.  Forced perspective and stop motion abound, and the movie is largely a fan homage to those in which Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien provided effects.

What one will also realize while watching the film is that the "four friends trapped in the forest dealing with an evil book provided by a professor" is, despite some marked differences, quite similar to The Evil Dead.  In fact, some plot points are so similar that the question has been frequently raised about if it was intentional.  While Sam Raimi himself had not seen the film prior to making his own (Equinox itself is quite obscure enough that one would be even more surprised if he had seen it), but some members of his crew had.  Being that the set-up for both help keep production costs down (isolated location, limited cast, ability to spend more time focusing on special effects), it appears that it was more coincidence that anything. Still, this should at least be viewed for its special effects work and so one can draw their own conclusions.

Equinox (1970)
80 minutes
Starring: Edward Connell, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Bonner, Robin Christopher, Jack Woods
Director: Dennis Muren, Jack Woods, Mark Thomas McGee

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more